xanthe and the logger
sit down, let me tell you a story
Xanthe and I went to theatre school together in Ontario back in the 90s. Back then she was wild. A committed stoner with enormous green eyes, a hay bale of hair and breasts that were celebrated from Scarborough to Mississauga. Xanthe read everything, at fifteen she subscribed to both The New Yorker and Penthouse Forum, and told long hilarious stories about working in grow ops on the West Coast. She was constantly hungry because of the hash and always looking for food or eating it. After hippy guys and bottle tokes, her favourite hobby was sniffing the bottom of the kitchen broom to make herself sneeze which she said was like having orgasm with her clothes on.
Xanthe and I kept in touch over the years and last week she visited me in London. She’d flown over from Miami for work. She’s divorced now with two kids and lives with her boyfriend and his two teenage girls in a suburban monster home in a gated community with a swimming pool. Xanthe’s the marketing manager of a major publishing company, so at first we talked shop. Then, once I’d put the boys to bed, we opened a bottle of wine and she told me a story, one of her many long stories. But this one I’ll never forget.
A couple of years ago, just after her divorce at age forty-two, Xanthe did what many newly single women women do in midlife. She got suddenly skinny, bought a new wardrobe and went on a mad dating tear. Before long, Xanthe was seeing multiple men in multiple cities, which worked for her because she travels a lot with her job. It was during this time Xanthe met Caleb, the boyfriend with whom she now lives and who is, she insists, the love of her life. But because Xanthe met Caleb on a dating app, which was how she’d met various other men in various other cities, she did not recognise it straight away. In fact, for almost a year, Xanthe and Caleb saw each other only every other weekend, and Xanthe was fine with the arrangement. She told Caleb she wanted to keep things casual. She reasoned it was all their busy work and conflicting childcare schedules would permit. But in truth, Xanthe wasn’t quite done with her tear — she wanted to see it out to the end.
Xanthe was in a reflective mood, she was feeling both restless and reckless— so she upped the ante, by which I mean she started looking up old flames online. The headiness of her freedom, the feelings of nostalgia it provoked, drew her back to her memories, her buried treasures, those initial short sharp stabs of joy. And the feelings came back to her, acutely, like a series of sneezes, as she pondered faces and Google footprints of the men she’d once desired. And before long, Xanthe found herself engaged in an intense and highly unlikely text affair with her first love — a boy she’d kissed on the playground in grade one.
Today Xanthe lives in Miami but she grew up far away on the opposite end of the continent, in a small logging town on the Sunshine Coast in British Columbia. And one of the interesting things about Xanthe’s first love, the aspect of his character that in fact most aroused her, was that he still lived there, in the town where they’d both grown up. The boy was a man now, he was single and what’s more, he was a logger. An actual real life lumber jack. And for Xanthe, that was hot.
The logger described his life to Xanthe over texts and she was rapt. Most nights he drank at the same bar where she’d been served her first underaged beer. He lived in a tumble down cabin down the road from her brother. The logger had married right out of high school, a sour little brunette whom Xanthe vaguely remembered not much liking in grade one. Everything about the logger and his life was vivid to Xanthe. He was exotic but also familiar and this she found deeply erotic. Xanthe knew the logger and yet she did not know the logger. They had nothing and everything in common. Unlike Caleb, the logger was not a stranger on the internet. And as their text affair continued, Xanthe began to fall deeply in love. Soon she was overwhelmed with desire, waiting on tenterhooks for the logger’s next text or call. And then one night, without warning, he sent her a picture of his penis.